FROM THE DRIVER'S SEAT - CHRISTINE'S LAIR

REPAIRS BEGIN, AND IT TURNS OUT WE'RE NOT TOO BAD AT THIS JAGUAR LARK....

Injury of the week - minor miscellaneous grinding burns

On the DVD player - anything funny.

Helper of the week - Mr David again. He must get bored of it.

OK, so there are a couple of steps missing here, we've skipped straight to the nearly-done part.

The spare chunk of V12 we had handy was cut to size and welded in. The careful cutting of car and repair section took far longer than expected, but the end result was quite a neat repair.

The radiator survived, so is simply refitted, it was close to being destroyed, there's the imprint of the crossbar in it, but it just held. The crossbraces both died, and we've run out of spares, so we made one, and in place of the second welded a tube to the oil cooler panel instead, yon can now jump up and down on it. If you wanted to. I don't know why you would, but you can. Please don't.

With a little more time now the car gets a few more finishing off pieces, ally infills to direct air through the rad instead of around and past it, the alloy radiator doesn't fill the hole the same way the Jag one does, and there's no sense having a high-performance rad and then letting the airflow blow straight past it...

With a new cooler and a painted wing stickered and fitted the only part left is the bonnet. Alex is held at gunpoint until he has put a new corner on the broken bonnet. It takes a week, but in his defence he had to build a complete bonnet mould first...

Headlight surrounds have become hard to source, so we build a mould for those too, having borrowed one off Helen. The new fibreglass surround that results is a whole 200g lighter, a massive saving, obviously. It's roughly equivalent to not having a cup of tea before qualifying.

It's a whole week til Snetterton and she's ready again. Planning for the Birkett therefore begins early...